UTA Racing Team

Transcript

Next, let me introduce you to Charles. He’s a senior industrial engineering major and is part of the Champion Formula racing team right in the heart of the UTA campus. These mavericks feel the need for speed every year since 1982. Students with UTA Racing design and build a formula race car that competes in the International Formula SAE Racing Series against universities from across the globe. Earlier this week, I got the chance to hang out with Charles and learn all about it. Have a watch. How awesome is this, Charles? This is awesome.

– So Formula SAE for Society of Automotive Engineers, it is a student led design competition where the students actually get to build, design and actually raise a formula style car. So throughout UTA’s history and 1982 is when we built our first formula SAE car, and every year since we built a brand new one and in total 11 championship wins, three being in the UK, Japan, and Australia.

– Unbelievable man.

– Lemme go show you some more.

– Yeah, let’s do it. You all are building these formula cars from the ground up.

– Every year we start right here in this room designing each component from the ground up, putting it in CAD, just to see how the overall product’s gonna look before we actually manufacture it.

– I mean it, it looks so complicated, Charles, right?

– It’s very scary at first, my first week in this, I was terrified, but few years in now I’m the chief engineer. Everything’s just so clear to me and I feel like I can build anything.

– Incredible.

– You wanna go see the garage?

– Yeah, I’d love to. So how many students are part of this program?

– So we’ll get around 20 to 30 full team members every year, and what’s awesome about that is they’ll come from all sorts of different majors, engineering, nursing, arts, biochem, you name it, and they’re actually able to use all of these different backgrounds and implement them into a real life project, which is great.

– Yeah, and that’s kind of look great on the resume.

– It does, there’s not many organizations that allow you to apply what you learn into a classroom, into a real life company essentially. So this is amazing for students.

– That’s so cool.

– You wanna go see ’em run?

– I’d love to.

– Let’s go look.

– This has to be the coolest club at the University of Texas, Arlington.

– Yes, it’s yes,

– It’s awesome. Thank you, Charles for having me join you and the team here on campus. These cars are incredible and so is UTA Racing. Their team of student engineers and drivers is one of the most successful in the series history with eight US championships and three more abroad. This is the “Maverick Factor” in action. Thank you Charles for showing us around. That was absolutely incredible. Take care.